The EU Funding Maze Has a New Exit: Cascade Funding Matcher
The problem for startups trying to access EU funding has never been the money. It is the maze they have to walk through to reach it.
Cascade funding moves hundreds of millions of euros across Europe every year, but access has often depended less on eligibility and more on how many hours a startup can spend reading portals, PDFs and newsletters that were never designed with founders in mind. The funding exists — what is missing is the infrastructure to help startups understand where they actually fit within it.
That is the gap we decided to close.
The result is Cascade Funding Matcher: an AI-powered matchmaking engine that scores your startup’s compatibility against every live cascade funding call in Europe, from 0 to 100, and explains not only whether you fit, but exactly why.
We are featuring it as part of our ongoing Partner Showcase series with one important difference: this one came from our own team.
Cascade Funding Matcher
The Person Behind the Tool: Miguel García González
To understand the Matcher, you need to understand the frustration that built it.
Miguel García González is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sploro, and someone who has been working inside the EU funding ecosystem since 2009, when he started with FP7. Seventeen years of proposals, consortia, open calls and eligibility criteria. Seventeen years of answering the same question from startups trying to find their way in.
“After 17 years in EU funding, I had answered the same question hundreds of times: ‘Miguel, is there a call for us?’ And every time, the honest answer required hours of manual digging across portals, PDFs and newsletters that were never designed for startups.”
What drove him to build Matcher was not a business opportunity, it was the accumulated weight of watching talented startups lose months to a system that was never built around them. Explaining the problem stopped being enough.
The Problem Still Waiting to Be Solved
Cascade funding is one of the most powerful and underused mechanisms in the European innovation ecosystem.
Unlike direct Horizon Europe grants, cascade funding distributes money through intermediaries: consortia that run their own open calls, each with its own website, deadlines and eligibility rules.
Because there is no single portal or centralised overview, startups are often left trying to build their own map from scattered information. For a startup without a dedicated grants manager, keeping track of it all is almost impossible. For a startup with one, it can still become a full-time job.
The gap was never the information itself. We had already been maintaining what Miguel describes as the most complete directory of cascade funding calls in Europe, built originally for internal use. The real gap was making that information work intelligently for the people who needed it most.
“The final straw was realising that we, at Sploro, were already maintaining the most complete directory of cascade funding calls in Europe — for ourselves. We had the data. The only thing missing was letting a machine do the matching instead of me reading call fiches at 11pm. So we built it.”
What Matcher Does Differently
The simplest way to explain Matcher is this: a keyword search tells you a call contains the word “health”. Matcher tells you whether your company actually fits that call, and why.
You input your startup profile: what you do, your maturity level, your country and your project focus. Matcher then scores your compatibility against every live call in the directory, from 0 to 100, and generates recommendations specific to your situation. These are not generic summaries or AI guesswork. The matching is built around structured eligibility data, which matters because cascade funding is unforgiving.
“The hardest part is not the 50 pages — it’s that the critical information is maybe 4 lines buried inside those 50 pages. Eligibility in cascade funding is brutal: TRL ranges, country restrictions, consortium requirements, sector definitions that change from call to call. A generic AI reads the document and gives you a nice summary that is 90% correct. In funding, 90% correct means you wasted a month preparing an application you were never eligible for. Our approach was simple: don’t let the AI improvise. The intelligence is in the matching, not in the guessing.”
This is where Matcher takes a different approach. Rather than relying solely on AI to interpret lengthy documents, every call is first structured by Sploro’s own team: people who have managed these programmes themselves and know exactly where the critical eligibility information is usually buried.
The Matches Nobody Saw Coming
Since Matcher went live, one pattern has surprised even Miguel: how often the best result is a call the startup had never heard of.
Cascade funding is scattered across hundreds of Horizon Europe projects, each running its own open calls with its own visibility — or lack of it. The startups best positioned to win a specific call are frequently the ones who never knew it existed. For many, the issue was never whether they were ready for EU funding. It was whether they could find the right opportunity before the deadline passed.
“Seeing users discover a 90+ match in a programme they didn’t know existed is exactly the problem we wanted to solve. That part is working.”
From Match to Proposal: What Comes Next
Finding a 95% match is the beginning, not the finish line.
Miguel is clear on this, and equally clear on the most common mistake startups make once they find a good opportunity.
“My advice: move immediately, but don’t write yet. First read the full call documentation — the match tells you the door is open, not that you can walk through it blindfolded. Check the deadline, the budget per project, and the effort required. Then build your application around what the call actually asks for, not around what you want to tell. This is the most common mistake I see.”
Once a startup has identified the right opportunity, the Sploro team can support the full cycle — from positioning and proposal writing through to contract signature when the grant is awarded. Matcher helps identify the right door. The team helps you walk through it.
The Bigger Vision: GrantTech as Infrastructure
Matcher is more than a product feature. It is part of a bigger argument Miguel has been making for years: EU public funding works when you know where to look and how to navigate it, but for most startups, those conditions are never met.
That does not mean the funding system is broken. It means there is a missing layer of infrastructure between the funding that exists and the companies that could benefit from it.
“I want EU public funding to work like a market, not like a maze. Today the funding exists — cascade funding alone distributes hundreds of millions per year — but access depends on who you know and how many hours you can spend reading portals. That is not a funding problem, it’s an infrastructure problem. If FinTech digitised money, GrantTech is digitising public funding — and Matcher is our contribution to that infrastructure.”
What makes that contribution different is what sits behind it: over a decade and a half of hands-on experience managing the programmes that Matcher helps startups discover.
Find Out Where You Fit
That infrastructure starts with something simple: free access to the basic search, available to anyone in our community right now, no trial period or commitment required.
Whether you are exploring EU funding for the first time or looking for your next cascade funding opportunity, the goal is the same: spend less time searching and more time building.
Because innovation should be judged by its potential, not by how well someone can navigate a maze of funding portals.
And if you find a strong match and want support turning it into a proposal worth submitting, the Sploro team is here for the full journey — from the first read of the call documentation to the final submission.
Don’t miss the opportunity that could be the turning point of your success
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